To Caliban

[TennyoCeres84]

I know that Eiko is technically your creator, but how did love form between the two of you? It's certainly not the traditional relationship of dating to get to know the other person, so how did you cope with the extended separation after you left Paradise? What was it like after you two met again? And where do you see your relationship today?

[IamLEAM1983]

"To be clear, Eiko is my creator; not my mother. This is a bit of semantics that all Chimeras tend to have to precise to most newcomers to transgenic lifeforms they happen to meet. We have designers and creators, but no parents to speak of. Plenty of Family Values groups and other Right-Wing varieties love to bill my relationship with Eiko as being incestuous, but there's really no incest happening here. Most of us never met those who spliced our genes or coded our individual DNA strands into being, so there's no real family connections to be observed, not even in the adoptive sense of the word.

In fact, if you'd rather I remain entirely rational, then my mother is the incubation tank I spent eight weeks in. There's never been any credible grounds for awkwardness between us, contrary to the opinions of certain critics who profess themselves Pro-Life and still have the gall to act offended when serviced by a member of the community that saw me reach Earth.

The simple fact is, I was imprinted with a basic knowledge of who Eiko was and what she'd been through, but was brought out of my tank within hours of Gregory's men capturing her. I left with a hazy impression of the woman who'd educated me with carefully constructed neural stimulation programs and had to learn to live with that confusing cloud of emotions and concepts for almost five years.

What sharpened my understanding of Eiko was my participation in the Battle of Hope. Something kept pushing me to protect those smaller than I was, to care for the civilians that had been scared of me back when I'd been a sewer-dwelling cryptid. That same moral core told me not to judge any of you for being scared of me, because they were right to be scared. I was, and still am different. There's no denying that. By then, I'd traded the sewers for a place in the Smith household, and I also had my first taste of power. I realized I could've acted like Gregory and abused the household's employed staff, or attempt to bully Henry into leaning the company's policies in favor of Transgenics - but that same core of goodness kept me from attempting it. I valued my place with the Smiths and I wanted to keep it. I'd keep it, I decided, and do something worthwhile with it.

It's at that point that I realized that I owned everything to Eiko. I remember the moment it happened in painstaking detail, the way the afternoon's sun was hitting my room's window and passing through the city's ash clouds... The city's devastation looked beautiful for that precise instant, when my window wasn't framing one of the collapsed skyscrapers or the roads below - nothing but dust clouds and sunlight - and I realized I cared because of her. I could freeze time and see beauty in that one surreal panorama, aware that I'd be back down with the Red Cross and the National Guard as soon as I'd be done with the afternoon's lessons in taming a boardroom or conference room.

I'm not a naturally violent individual. I never wanted to raise my hand against a fellow Chimera. I had to, but I never wanted to. I did everything I could to bring back the wounded and the dying, instead. I'd push my own brethren back with the help of a few dozen men, then keep them occupied while they loaded APCs with bodies from both sides. The Terrans didn't want to, not even the Karthian natives, but we had to. These poor people had given up their lives in the service of lies and deceit. The least we could do is give them a chance to heal or a last resting place. If they saw the people of Earth could show mercy, then maybe the truth would make its way in their ranks, after all...

In working with and for them, I realized that Eiko's imparted care was turning into something else. Relieved smiles on both sides only started to bring me so much consolation, and I felt I needed something more tangible. Again, a few days later, it dawned on me that I loved her. I needed and wanted her.

I tried to reach her using the Drifter comm buoys, at first. With the amount of space traffic in their area, she only received an intermittent connection. The message got lost, but she knew I'd tried to send something. We'd agreed on a set of seemingly random data drops to serve as basic stand-ins for Yes and No. The first one was a corrupted presentation file in Japanese, a piece from one of the orienteering videos she'd been forced to watch. The second one was an old Russian prospectus that was missing half of its data. I wasn't supposed to be able to open the file, anyway.

I tried to send her three little words, at first. I miss you, plain and simple.

She sent me the Yes file twice. She missed me, too.

I tried again. Is any of this fair? I asked.

I received the Russian prospectus in response.

I want to see you again.

Yes, three times.

I couldn't see her, but she could see me on the news broadcasts Paradise received. She says she fell in love with the man who crawled out of the city's sewers like a raving maniac and who actually turned out to be a level-headed man bearing answers about Goliath's suffered theft of recombined genetic strands. Answers, and a gift. She saw me give a few vials of my blood. The only condition I ever placed was that if anyone used it to create weaponized pathogens of any kind, I'd sue the life out of them. I hadn't been made to destroy, I was made to try and help. To heal.

She saw that, too.

I wasn't sure how it would seem if I admitted my love for her over low-latency LADAR transmissions; I'd never really had the time to get to know her, after all! I didn't confess to anything, at first. We stuck to strategizing the end of the war and Gregory's designs, most of the time, but I could tell it was always in the background. I wanted until it was safe for her to come down.

Once she saw me, I realized she'd seen me. A bit like Nereus with Meris, my nose told me everything I'd ever wanted to hear. She did love me.

We skipped the awkward introductions, the laughs, the bobbing between Japanese and English - and went straight to kissing. We were virtually glued together for months. I'd feel when she was anxious and she'd feel my own body tense in the right ways. We finished one another's sentences for a long time and had ourselves some awkward Blissfully Newlywed-type laughter on morning talk shows.

When she received her first ocular implants, what we'd had going on was stoked with a hot poker. I have several times more stamina than your average human male, and she wore me out on her first night as someone who could see! Everything became even more intense, to the point where I remember isolating myself on occasion, during the day. I'd gotten used to being touched by her almost constantly, but being stared at was something new...

Then, John told me he'd placed an order for color-refractive lenses. We almost cried in front of our dinnerplates, that night...

Again, once she could see in color, we didn't get much sleep for a few days. I remember finishing the Transgenics Commission with bags under my eyes, but there were some cases where those bags weren't there because I'd spent the night reviewing case files... I've never been so happy before or since, honestly.

Now? Well, the tedium of the average married couple settled in, but it's a happy kind of tedium. We come home with various degrees of exhaustion, we don't bother with being sunny or courteous with one another if we've had a horrible day at work, and we don't consider the occasional tiff as being grounds for group therapy. We love our respective grumpy selves as much as our sunnier dispositions, and we're past the point where we try and gussy ourselves up to make the other one melt.

Considering my, well, my maw, dental hygiene is a pretty long and fastidious process for me. Some nights I just damn it all and toss myself into bed as soon as nine o' clock rings. That means bad breath in the morning. I snore, too - and Eiko tells me I'm pretty loud at it. Such little nostrils and a big mouth like that... No wonder, hm?

Well, she doesn't mind in either case. I'll wake up with her nose just hairs away from my gummy teeth, realizing she's knocked out cold. She swears on her grandfather's head that she catches enough Z's, so I think she's compensated with her technical know-how. She never did tell me where she got those fancy frequency-cancelling ear plugs, actually...

We're happy enough. That's the short of it. We're not the cast members of some sappy mixed-race Sci Fi Romance à la Twilight. I piss her off with my favorite turtlenecks and she pisses me off because she keeps criticizing the way I hand out business cards the American way - but we'd both rather die than check out the other fish in the pond, so to speak.

Besides, she tells me she likes a man with crooked teeth... Is there anything more crooked than a Tyrannosaurus Rex's mouth?"